Clustering Techniques in Data Mining—A Survey

Abstract

In last few years there has been tremendous research interest in devising efficient data mining algorithms. Clustering is a very essential component of data mining techniques. Interestingly, the special nature of data mining makes the classical clustering algorithms unsuitable. These characteristics are usually very large datasets; the dataset need not be necessarily numeric and hence importance should be given to efficient I/O operations instead of algorithmic complexity. As a result in last few years a number of clustering algorithms are proposed for data mining. The present paper gives a brief overview of these algorithms. The first part of the paper discusses numerical clustering which are classified into partitioned clustering and hierarchical clustering. In the second part the paper discusses the clustering algorithms for categorical data.